The Creation Museum. Fundamentalists: 1, Logic: 0

Ars Technica goes to look at the new Creation Museum to see what the fuss is about.

A museum like no other.

Here at Ars Technica we've written about the US creationist movement and its attack on science quite regularly. From attempts to alter the way science is taught in different states across the US to statements from potential presidents, there's no denying that creationists garner a lot of column inches. So when I found out that they were building their answer to a science museum about an hour's drive away, I knew that I'd have to go and take a look.
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This particular Museum received a lot of flak on Digg.com, and so it should! Many people are misunderstanding WHY it is being laughed at, though.

I don't think anyone is laughing at this "Museum" because it attempts to explain where the world came from, nor is anyone saying that evolution provides a completely reliable reason for what/who created everything at the start.

The fact of the matter is that this "Museum" is an attempt to rationalize an illogical theory that a group of people have taken from a book that was compiled over a period of 3000 years. This is fine, they're allowed to come up with support for their theory; however, in doing so, they're not only attempting to refute evolution, but virtually every discovery about the history of our world that science has made for the past two thousand years or so; discoveries in the fields of Geology, Physics, and Anthropology.

This Museum, and many other young-earth creationists, are not arguing that God created a world that was 10 billion years old -hence giving a somewhat coherent reason for the existence of fossils, coal, and all of these other things-. They're arguing that the world is 6000 years old, literally, in every sense. They are then coming up with incredulous and unreasonable theories as to why things such as fossils exist.

This is the problem that people have with the museum. This is the problem that people have with young-earth creationists. I think you'll find that most people do believe in some sort of god, or higher power, they simply don't believe in this...trash.
Have a read one of these theories carefully:

"Today we find evidence of exotic plant fossil es in regular sequence, from small plants, to trees. Evidence of a huge floating forest" they then go on to say that "4,350 years ago, when the flood waves became large enough, they began tearing apart the floating forest from the outside edge inward, in sequence reflecting the forest structure, plants torn from the ground became waterlogged, sank, and were buried on the bottom."

So, we have a floating forest, that has trees made from a wood that sinks when it gets wet (all the plants sank, every one of them? Remember, that dove Noah released didn't find any plants until the flood waters receded, so everything must have sunk). This forest has tiny little plants in the outside, giant big ones in the center, and no small ones in the middle at all. C'mon, look at a forest one of these days, they have undergrowth all through them, they don't all just have small plants on the outside and big ones on the inside. Furthermore, trees are heavier than small plants. Over a long period of time, heavy things sink to the bottom, it's the main idea behind panning for gold, and the separation of DNA; large heavy things go down, small things don't, if a floating forest had been torn apart, and everything had sunk, over the period of hundreds of years, the bigger, heavier trees would have ended up at the bottom. But we don't see this, even the 'museum' admits that.

Just this one theory is full of holes. the majority of what young-earth creationists come up with fly in the face of almost every scientific discovery that has been made about the history of our world. Failing that, they are resorting to ad hominen attacks, or the tried and trusty "It's in the bible, it must be true."

In short, they are coming up with reasons, and what they call evidence, that supports their perspective, and throwing out anything that disagrees with them. Science generally tends to accept that it can be wrong, unfortunately fundamentalists have yet to learn how to do the same.



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